Dawn of the space age
All Shadowed by fear of war, the initial launch of Sputnik revealed humanity at its most bold
Shadowed by fear of war, the initial launch of Sputnik revealed
humanity at its most bold
Sixty years ago, the world stood still, gazed at the sky and listened through shortwave radio receivers with fascination and fear. For millennia, humans had clung to the Earth’s surface, only recently having mastered the longheld dream of flight and with scant awareness of what lay beyond the thin veil of the atmosphere. But, on 4 October 1957, our sense of place in the cosmos changed forever. Over three weeks, a steady ‘beep-beep’ transmission from Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite – heralded the dawn of the space age. Yet the euphoria of conquering space was met by harsh Cold War reality, as Russia and America sought to deliver weapons of enormous destruction across intercontinental distances.
For something which changed the world, Sputnik 1 was an unremarkable icon. It was a polished metal sphere, 23-inches across, with four antennas to broadcast radio pulses at 20.005 MHz and 40.002 MHz, easily audible to amateur radio listeners. Circling the globe at 65-degrees of inclination, its flight path carried it over virtually the entire inhabited Earth, completing an orbit every 96.2 minutes. Its signal vanished when its batteries died, and the 184-pound satellite burned up in the atmosphere in January 1958.
Thus began the space race between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union to attain mastery over the heavens. Following the World War II, both nations used captured German scientists and rockets (including the infamous V-2) to further their ambitions of building intercontinental ballistic missiles to establish technological and ideological supremacy over the other. Juxtaposed against this bellicose stance was the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year, a concerted 18-month campaign of Earth science research. In the summer of 1955, the United States and the Soviet Union pledged to launch a satellite during the IGY.
Politically, Sputnik 1 was a great shock, and demolished Western perceptions of Russia as a backward nation of potato farmers. Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke reflected that on 4 October 1957, the United States became a second-rate world power, while economist Bernard Baruch praised the Soviets’ “imagination to hitch its wagon to the stars” and stressed that American paranoia was well founded. During his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy played into this palpable sense of national dread by claiming that Soviet hegemony in space could someday afford them control of the Earth.
After the ‘Sputnik Crisis’, political figures increasingly spoke of a ‘gap’ in missile-building technology, with the United States falling behind the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Soviets created the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile – the R-7 – and test flew it across a distance of 3,700 miles, before using a modified version to launch Sputnik 1. Remarkably, the same basic rocket is still used to launch satellites and humans today. The missile gap was promulgated by the Gaither Report in November 1957, which recommended a significant strengthening of US military might. Its figures were exaggerated, but the fiction of a missile gap galvanised America into forming NASA in October 1958, and accelerated the development of rockets to send men into space.
America’s ascendancy in space began with disappointment. In December 1957, a Vanguard rocket exploded on the launch pad, triggering a media frenzy. Journalists mocked it as ‘Kaputnik’, while Soviet delegates to the United Nations tauntingly wondered if the United States needed aid as an “undeveloped nation”. Finally, on 31 January 1958, Explorer 1 became America’s first successful satellite. Six weeks later, it was followed by Vanguard 1, disparagingly nicknamed “the grapefruit” by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. However, the smallness of these early satellites belied their advanced scientific capabilities. Explorer 1 discovered the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, while Vanguard 1 remains the oldest man-made object still in orbit today.
The benefits of satellites for a range of applications – from communications to reconnaissance and navigation to scientific research – had long been recognised, and in December
1958, the first test of a relay was used to broadcast Christmas greetings from US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Two years later, Echo 1 became the world’s first passive communications satellite, followed by Telstar, which transmitted television pictures, telephone calls and telegraph images, as well as a live transatlantic feed between the United States and Belgium.
It was Arthur C. Clarke who first widely disseminated the idea of putting satellites into ‘geostationary’ orbit, more than 22,000 miles above the Earth, matching the planet’s rotation for worldwide communications. Syncom 3 was first to reach this high orbit, relaying images from the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. This laid the foundation for hundreds more communications
“The pendulum shifted in the mid-1960s, and truly America took the lead”
satellites, which continue to deliver telephone and television services, as well as radio broadcasts and internet access.
Of course, the Cold War inspired less peaceful activities, too, and planning for reconnaissance satellites was set in motion early in the space age. However, it was only after the infamous shootdown of Gary Powers’ U-2 reconnaissance aircraft in
May 1960 that the need for military eyes in space became commonplace. In August of that year, Discoverer 13 became the first satellite to return an object safely to Earth, in the form of a classified film canister. Less than two weeks later, the Soviets brought their Korabl-Sputnik 2 spacecraft, carrying the dogs Belka and Strelka, back home. It was the first time that living creatures had been launched into orbit and returned alive.
Sending living creatures, and eventually humans, into space was an important driving force. In November 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, carrying a dog, Laika. Several animals had already flown above the 62-mile-high ‘Kármán line’ – the internationally recognised boundary for the edge of space – but threeyear-old Laika was first to actually achieve orbit. Following a stressful launch, in which her heart rate more than doubled, Laika died within hours, when the cabin overheated. Her legacy is that she unmasked some of the unknowns about the survivability of launch, orbital acceleration and the effects of weightlessness. Laika laid the groundwork for the 108-minute orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, on 12 April 1961.
If Sputnik 1 shocked the world, then Gagarin’s mission shocked it again, particularly as it occurred only months into the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Matters worsened when CIA attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro failed, leaving Kennedy humiliated, and in need of a means to re-establish his nation’s prestige. Although Alan Shepard became America’s first man in space on 5 May 1961, his Redstone booster was only capable of a 15-minute suborbital flight. Not until the following year did John Glenn – riding the larger, more powerful Atlas rocket – actually achieve orbit.
Despite such limited spaceflight experience, Kennedy told a joint session of Congress that he intended to direct the United States to land a man on the Moon, before the end of the decade. It was a challenging gamble, since lunar exploration had been pioneered by the Soviets. In January 1959, Luna 1 became the first man-made object to reach the Moon, measuring the solar wind, and eventually entering heliocentric orbit. Before the year ended, Luna 2 had been intentionally crashed into the surface, and Luna 3 returned the first photographs of the Moon’s far side, never before seen by human
eyes. 0n 3 February 1966, a Soviet spacecraft, Luna 9, performed the first soft landing on another celestial body.
Russia also held the advantage in human space exploration, flying cosmonauts into orbit for several days, sending the first woman into space, launching the first multi-person spacecraft and executing the world’s first spacewalk. However, the pendulum shifted in the mid-1960s, and America took the lead, flying longer missions, performing spacewalks and docking with other spacecraft. Its investment in Kennedy’s goal peaked at 5 per cent of the federal budget. Meanwhile, the Soviets suffered the premature death of their chief rocket designer, Sergei Korolev, and the advantage slipped from their fingers. Yet the dangers of space exploration were ever-present. America lost three Apollo astronauts in a launch pad fire in January 1967 and, just three months later, a Russian cosmonaut plunged to his death when the parachutes on his descending Soyuz spacecraft failed to open.
In spite of the emphasis on reaching the Moon, both nations also turned their attention further afield, with the United States completing the first flyby of Mars with Mariner 4 in July 1965.
The spacecraft’s photographs revealed a hostile world, with no evidence of wind or water erosion, and a virtual absence of a magnetic field. Soviet missions to the Red Planet were more troubled: three exploded during launch, and another was lost during its outward journey. Mariner 2 flew past Venus in December 1962, while Russia’s Venera 3 was first to crash-land on the planet’s surface in March 1966. A year later, Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to take direct measurements from another planet’s atmosphere, revealing carbon dioxide as Venus’ main constituent.
The race to the Moon continued unabated. In November 1967, America test flew its Saturn V lunar rocket for the first time, and the following September, Russia launched the Zond 5 spacecraft around the Moon, carrying a payload which included mealworms, wine flies, plants and a pair of tortoises. They became the first living creatures to venture into deep space, visit our closest celestial neighbour and return safely to Earth.
As the end of the decade approached and the final lap of the space race began, CIA intelligence